• 7zip (archive tool) People still use Winrar for whatever reason.
• Firefox (web browser) - It’s well known but still under-used. Stop using chrome. Chrome will be the end of the free internet.
• windirstat (visualise used disk space) - I use this to clear free space
• musicbee (music player) - replaced VLC with this because VLC has had a bug that makes it not playback FLAC files properly for like… A year?
• Screen2Gif (gif recorder & editor)
• ShareX (screenshot/video tool)
• Open Video Downloader (GUI tool to rip YouTube etc.)
• uBlock Origin (ad-blocker) addon
• Sponsorblock (sponsorship skipper) addon

I fucking hate Teracopy with a vengeance. It’s such a buggy piece of shit. I have never seen it not fuck up and crash when you ask it to do something remotely challenging.

Robocopy is the only thing I use for serious file copy/move jobs.

Governments are probably already directly influencing Lemmy with the usual astroturfing at the very least

See, what you’re having trouble with here is that you don’t want to support censorship, even though you do. You don’t like the connotations, so you find some excuse that makes it more comfortable for you. It’s cowardly and dishonest. The word means what it means. Call me a pedant, tell me I’m not adding to the conversation, I don’t care. You’re still supporting censorship whether you want to wear that label or not.

The term predates that usage by well over 2000 years. Roman censors would essentially punish people for immoral behaviour by taking away their rights or by reducing their status in some way - for example, punishing them for speaking out of turn or publishing offensive material.

Censorship usually is taken to mean the suppression of speech or writing. If you’re legally prohibited from saying or writing something, you’re being censored, by definition.

Where are you getting your definition of censorship as meaning content being edited?

Whether I agree with you or not, technically, it is still censorship. Censorship is the limitations and restrictions on the freedom of expression, for example, prohibiting the publication of threats of violence is still a restriction on freedom of expression. It just happens to be censorship you agree with - that does not counteract the fact that it is censorship.

While governments can’t directly manipulate Lemmy

What the fuck are you smoking? Of course they can.

Given that most people get Pokémon cards in packs of, at least, 15, and their first is usually a whole deck, I dunno if you could really get a lot of people who remember their first card, I definitely don’t! My favourite is definitely Growlithe, but I have no recollection of what my first cards were really, it’s too long ago!

As SI prefixes, they’re all multiples of ten, technically speaking. So referring to 1,024 bytes as a kilobyte is incorrect, it’s 1.024 kilobytes or 1 kibibyte. Microsoft deciding to ignore industry and international standards is the reason for the confusion.

But either way, hard drive manufacturers will sell a 1TB drive, and Windows will see that as a 935GB drive - that’s basically the difference between 2^40 bytes vs. 10^12 bytes

Unless you’re a hard drive manufacturer, of course :)

You can’t really compare small-scale clusters of highly available services with the scale of the entire Internet, it’s just an entirely different ballgame. Though even in small scale setups, there is always a sweet spot between too many paths and not enough paths - VRRP (which is the protocol usually used for high availability) actually has quite a big overhead, you can’t have too many connections on the same network or it causes lots of problems.

Internet scale routing usually uses BGP, which also has quite a heavy overhead.

I guess all you need to understand is that routing isn’t free, and the more routes, the more overhead. So there’s always going to be a point where adding more routes just makes things slower rather than faster. And BGP… is just a bit of a mess, right now, honestly. The BGP table has grown so big that a lot of older devices can’t keep it in fast memory anymore, so they either have to be replaced with newer hardware or use slow memory (and therefore slow processing of packets). So it’s not really in everyone’s best interests to just keep adding more routes. It’s harder and harder to justify.

why there are so many more connections in the north east and west coast if more connections slows the whole system down

I’m not from the US, so at best it would be an educated guess.

Firstly, it’s not as simple as just “more connections is more slow”, it means there’s a greater overhead. If the improvement from adding another line is greater than the overhead, then it can be worthwhile. For example, imagine a simple network with three routers, A, B and C, where A is connected only to B, and C is connected only to B, meaning that B is connected to both A and C. If there is a large amount of traffic between A and C, it may be worth adding a direct connection between them. If there isn’t, then it’s probably not worth doing.

I guess it’s a bit like adding a new road between two existing roads. Is it worth adding a junction and a set of traffic lights to some existing roads, or would that slow down traffic enough not to be worth doing?

Maybe, since you work with software more, it would make sense to put it this way: why don’t you create an index for every single possible column and table in SQL?

Or just look at it like premature optimisation. There’s a saying about premature optimisation in software engineering! ;-)

Another thing to keep in mind though is that there’s definitely still quite a few bad decisions still kicking around from when the internet was new. It takes time and effort to get rid of the legacy junk, same as in programming.

The problem that I’m having (and why I asked that) is because I was assuming that you would have some knowledge which you don’t seem to have with a lot of my comments. I’m really not trying to be rude, but it makes it a lot more difficult to explain the flaws in your reasoning when you’re talking about topics that are beyond your knowledge as if you know them well.

I have explained the realities of the situation to you, if you don’t want to accept them, that’s fine, but you’re basically arguing with an expert about something you don’t really understand very well. I’m happy to explain stuff but you should just ask rather than assume you know better because it makes it much more difficult for me to understand the gaps in your understanding/knowledge.

So ultimately, for routers, we have a number of limited resources. Firstly, yes, interfaces, but also the usual stuff - CPU, RAM, etc.

Now, I mentioned before that routing protocols are very complex - they have many metrics which are taken into account to determine what path is ultimately best for each packet. This is a process which can be quite intensive on CPU and RAM - because the router needs to “remember” all of the possible routes/destinations a packet can travel, as well as all of the metrics for each destination - distance, delays, administrative distance, TTL, dropped packets, etc. and then make a decision about processing it. And it needs to make these decisions billions of times a second. Slowing it down, even a tiny bit, can hugely impact the total throughout of the router.

When you add another connection to a router, you’re not just increasing the load for that one router, but for the routers which connect to the routers which connect to those routers which route to the routers that route to that router… you get the idea. It increases the number of options available, and so it places additional burden on memory and processing. When the ultimate difference in distance even an extra 100 miles, that’s less than a millisecond of travelling time. It’s not worth the added complexity.

That’s what I meant when I said that an extra hop isn’t worth worrying about, but adding additional connections is inefficient.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that you don’t really know what you’re talking about. Are you a professional network engineer or are you just a hobbyist?

When many people say socialism, what they mean is capitalist democracy

Lol. Lmao, even

I just wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed this comment. I think it has some good advice but the writing style is kind of unique, it’s almost alien in a way that I can’t quite explain, I liked it!

Yep, I mean, the comment you’re replying to literally contains the phrase, “the biggest issues are interference…” haha

Likewise, it’s something that’s likely to improve as we tend to move away from the 2.4GHz band.

Dropping packets is definitely more of a problem for streaming in particular, rather than anything else, because like you said, if you drop packets you’re going to get degraded quality video. If you were gaming locally, it wouldn’t really affect you as much. Online games have extremely good, well designed methods of compensating for dropped packets in a way that streaming will never be able to match.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that topology - the fact that you seem to think that the design is a bad thing really demonstrates your lack of understanding here.

For example, have you never wondered why we don’t just connect every device in a network all together like a big daisy chain? Or why we don’t use a mesh network? There is a large number of reasons why we don’t really use those topologies anymore.

I don’t want to get into the specifics, but in general, the more networks a router is connected to, the less efficient it is overall.

The propagation delay is pretty insignificant for most routers. Carrier grade routers like those at the core of the internet can handle up to 43 billion packets per second, another hop is absolutely nothing in terms of delay.

Sorry, what I wrote here was unclear, I wrote it needs less boosting in another comment, but re-reading this one, it does sound like I’m claiming it needs no boosting over any distance - that’s not what I meant though! I just meant that you can run an equivalent link without any boosting further than you could with copper.

Interference isn’t actually that big of a deal for Ethernet over copper, unless the installer does something silly like run UTP alongside high power electrical lines, or next to a diesel generator, or something. Between shielding, the use of balanced signals, and the design of twisted pair, most interference is eliminated.

Thanks for the response, it’s nice to chat with you :)

latency of the medium is so equivalent as to be practically unmeasureable

More or less, yup. There are some cool uses of RF to achieve very high bandwidth, low latency connections (5G as a common example, but Wi-Fi 7 has a theoretical maximum speed of 46Gbps - while this is still far behind the maximum speed of Ethernet (We have 400Gbps Ethernet in use, with 800Gbps in development), it’s catching up very fast - and since most households and businesses with copper cabling will be using mostly CAT5e or 6a Ethernet (1Gbps/100m and 10Gbps/100m respectively), Wi-Fi will soon likely be faster than most copper Ethernet networks. It’s also very likely that 5G internet will all but supplant ADSL and VDSL connections in the coming years. I think twisted-pair copper cabling is following in the footsteps of coax :)

Even with in-home fiber

The minimum latency of a connection through fiber is about the same (actually, slightly less, but not enough to matter) than the same connection made through copper. Signal propagation speed is not a benefit of fiber over copper - the benefits of fiber are that you can have many, many more connections in the same diameter of cable than with copper, it’s immune to electromagnetic interference, and it can run much further distances without needing signal boosting.

most WiFi routers don’t have particularly fast CPUs, or high-performance buses.

That’s one of the main issues, yeah - consumer grade electronics are usually total junk, especially the free routers provided by ISPs, but I’m also thinking of those absolutely horrible “gaming” Wi-Fi routers provided by the likes of ASUS - they have decent specs, but they’re just absolutely overloaded with features that gobble RAM and CPU. Dear consumer electronics manufacturers, please just let the router be a router, and let the Wi-Fi APs be Wi-Fi APs. Combine the router and the Wi-Fi AP if you must, but absolutely please stop suggesting that people can run a hundred services from routers. You should totally upsell that feature in a separate node appliance or something! Sorry, I got distracted.

it’s cheaper and easier to get a fast ethernet switch than a fast WiFi router

I agree, but I also don’t - most consumers don’t really know what a switch is or why they might need one. Most switches found in houses are either integrated with a router, power line adapter, or Wi-Fi access point. While a good switch is absolutely going to be much cheaper than a good Wi-Fi AP, most people wouldn’t really look to buy one. They might search for “Ethernet hub” on Amazon and luck into buying a decent switch, but I think most people think in terms of Wi-Fi these days, so it’s probably easier to get a Wi-Fi AP than a switch.

Also, just a minor nitpick: “fast Ethernet” is a little confusing, as terminology, because that’s the marketing name used to refer to 100mbps Ethernet connections (often indicated on network devices as FE) - so named because it was the successor to 10mbps (regular) Ethernet. (damn you, marketing people! I blame y’all for what you did to USB) When we discuss this kind of thing, it’s clearer to refer to ‘high speed Ethernet’ or refer specifically to line speed (e.g. 10GbE) - unless we’re talking about 100mbps Ethernet! Although, even then, it’s probably a bit confusing these days - I’d call it 10/100 Ethernet usually, rather than fast Ethernet, unless I was being really lazy (“yeah just stick it in the f/e port”)

I doubt any of this has as much of a latency impact as WAN factors

It definitely can do, but in a properly functioning network, I’d agree. If you have a faulty connection or significant source of interference or impedance, then that would be much more of an issue than anything else - otherwise, yeah, it’s going to be the Internet where most of the latency comes in to play. I would estimate that probably 75% of people could get big improvements to their online experience by making changes to their home network, but at a certain point, yes, contention becomes the bottleneck, which is not so easily solved :)